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by beardedetim 105 days ago
This is what I don't understand about this policy. There's no way a senior has enough spare capacity to be the gate keeper on every PR made by AI below them. So now we are just making it so the senior people use more AI to keep up but now they're to blame for letting it happen.

It sounds like a piss poor deal for seniors unless senior engineer now means professional code reviewer.

1 comments

That's amazon in a nutshell though. Create conflicting metrics for performance, push credit up and responsibility down, punish everyone below you for not meeting the double standards
> Create conflicting metrics for performance, push credit up and responsibility down, punish everyone below you for not meeting the double standards

This resonates with my experience.

The only thing you forgot is that you can also use the 12^H^H 14 leadership principles to argue whatever you want (and then the opposite of what you argued last month, still using the same leadership principles).

Got a project finished early? Well, you didn't insist on the highest standards. Made sure things were held to a high standard? Well, you weren't biased for action.

Were you a knowledge source for the entire team? Well, you weren't learning and being curious. Did you ask a lot of questions to learn everything? Well, then you weren't "are right a lot".

Did you think big and come up with an architecture that saved Amazon a lot of money? Then you weren't inventing and simplifying. Build something simple to get out out the door quick? Well, you weren't thinking big.

Did you act quickly without consulting others to fix an issue? Well you weren't earning trust. Did you consult people to make sure they were happy with the solution? Well you weren't biased for action.

Thats just a few examples, there's so many more

Very nice, I can imagine someone turning it into a little satirical webpage, which implements a kind of decision tree:

1. Choose from a set of challenge types (e.g. meeting a deadline, reliability)

2. Choose whether the challenge was "met" or "failed".

3. Choose whether you want to make the person look good or bad, by following/ignoring a principle.

4. Results: A list of relevant principles with short rationalizations.

I'm almost tempted to try, except perhaps I should treasure my ignorance.

If a tool like that gets popular enough that most employees are using it for office-politics, it might even start to deflate the whole Leadership Principles thing.

I have always received my accolade and never seen that twisted in that way there, though. But that was during covid. And in Europe.
the key is to understand which LPs apply to your L+1 and which apply to you (hint: its not the fun ones)